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Object documentation Relationship Classes  Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

Definition

Relationships represent interdependencies between documents. A relationship links two documents according to specific criteria. Various types or relationships, called relationship classes, exist independently of these criteria. The Knowledge Provider has its own pre-defined relationship classes. An application can also define its own relationship classes.

The pre-defined relationship classes are located in the document area System under Relationship classes:

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Relationship classes provided with the system

Use

In order to create relationship classes, you must first consider what kinds of relationships may occur. For example, answer the following questions:

With the DMWB you can create virtual relationship classes, which serve as models or templates for real relationship classes. The real relationship classes inherit their instance attributes from the virtual relationship classes.

Example

If the content of a document is changed and a new content version of the document created, a relationship of the type content versioning (VERSIONREF) is created between the physical info objects of both documents. This relationship represents a record of the creation of the new content version.

If a document is translated from German into English, a language relationship exists between the two documents. This relationship likewise represents a record of the creation of the English document. The criterion for the creation of the relationship is in this case the language. The creation and administration of this kind of language relationship is called language versioning (TRANSLREF).

The most commonly used types of relationships or relationship classes are as follows:

A collection relationship (LOGOBJECT) defines that every physical document belongs to one logical document. This relationship connects 1 logical document with n physical documents.

A template relationship (EXPORTMDL) exists between two physical documents only. It allows a particular document to function as a template for the creation of another document or multiple other documents. This relationship is used when new documents are created.

The version relationships for content, format, and language (VERSIONREF, FORMATREF, TRANSLREF) between document A and document B (also within one info object class) show that, for example, document A was created as a version of document B. Document A, then, can be the following:

A description relationship (DESCOBJECT) shows that an info object represents a description of another info object. This can be useful, for example, when the content stored in Knowledge Provider is a picture.

A structure relationship (STRUCTLINK) models a hierarchical relationship between the content of documents. This kind of relationship could be, for example, the relationships between chapters and paragraphs in a book.

A hyperlink relationship (HYPERLINK) is used to represent hyperlinks between documents. If a hyperlink links to a logical document, the Knowledge Provider’s Context Resolution functionality is used (for more information on this, see the SAP Library documentation under SAP Web Application Server → Knowledge Provider → Context Resolution).

For more information on relationship classes, see the section Relationships in the Knowledge Provider documentation.

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